A short walk away on an indoor stage, Ella Purnell<\/a> and Kyle MacLachlan<\/a> have been filming their characters\u2019 long-anticipated reunion. The cameras are on Purnell\u2019s Lucy MacLean, a sheltered former Vault dweller who\u2019s traveled from the California coast to New Vegas in pursuit of her father.<\/p>\n \u201cMy little Sugarbomb,\u201d says MacLachlan as Hank MacLean to a woozy Lucy just before she passes out. Among those observing the takes on the monitors are \u201cFallout\u201d showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.<\/p>\n Both moments take place within the final minutes of \u201cThe Wrangler,\u201d the fifth episode of the Prime Video series\u2019 second season, which sees Lucy and the Ghoul finally make their way through the streets of the post-apocalyptic remnants of Sin City after trekking through the Mojave Desert together.<\/p>\n An adaptation of the popular video game<\/a> franchise, \u201cFallout\u201d is set in an alternate future around 200 years after much of the world was decimated by nuclear bombs. Some Americans, including Lucy\u2019s father Hank, survived by moving into a network of underground bunkers called Vaults, while others were left to fend for themselves in the Wasteland.<\/p>\n In a flashback, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) visits Las Vegas in \u201cFallout\u201d Season 2. <\/p>\n (Lorenzo Sisti \/ Prime Video)<\/p>\n Unlike many of the locations featured in the series so far, New Vegas is one that fans of the franchise are very familiar with because it\u2019s the setting of the 2010 game \u201cFallout: New Vegas.\u201d<\/p>\n Although incorporating such an iconic setting came with its own challenges, the allure of taking the story to New Vegas was too irresistible for the show\u2019s creative team.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Lucy left the Vault, she was very innocent, very naive,\u201d says Robertson-Dworet. By the end of the first season, \u201cshe\u2019s had a couple of weeks in the Wasteland and she\u2019s certainly had her eyes opened a fair amount. But she is on a journey to follow her father and uncover even darker secrets. So the idea of taking her to the actual City of Sin was incredibly appealing at a metaphorical or character level.\u201d<\/p>\n Audiences have seen how Lucy\u2019s time on the surface world has been affecting her. And her first day in New Vegas has been a doozy: She encountered terrifying mutated reptilian creatures known as Deathclaws, has been dealing with a drug addiction, committed some theft and even killed a man.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we get closer to Vegas \u2026 you really start to get to see how much [the Ghoul has] rubbed off on her,\u201d executive producer Jonathan Nolan says. \u201cThat fundamental question of \u2018Is she willing to to break some of the same rules that he is?\u2019 is one of the driving questions of the narrative. How far is too far and \u2026 how many of her carefully fostered beliefs \u2026 will survive the journey through the Wasteland?\u201d<\/p>\n The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) sitting alone inside the Atomic Wrangler Hotel room in \u201cFallout.\u201d <\/p>\n (Prime Video)<\/p>\n Bethesda Game Studios\u2019 Todd Howard, who serves as an executive producer of the \u201cFallout\u201d series, acknowledges that bringing New Vegas into the show for Season 2 added \u201can element of difficulty above and beyond that of Season 1.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s exciting because you\u2019re going to an iconic \u2018Fallout\u2019 location, but it\u2019s also tricky because players know it,\u201d Howard explains. \u201cIt\u2019s easier, creatively, to go someplace [players] don\u2019t know, but to take the show to a place that they know and love so much, you really have to be extra careful.\u201d<\/p>\n The dilemma for the show\u2019s creative team involved the balance between video game accuracy and the realities of building practical sets. While using a digital background would enable the show to recreate the precise geography of the games, the team\u2019s aim is to try to build and use as many real sets, props and effects as possible.<\/p>\n \u201cOur feeling was always \u2026 that we can make it more cinematic, more tactile, if we actually build [New Vegas],\u201d Robertson-Dworet says. \u201cThe trade off is going to be [that] maybe we are not going to get it right down to the pixel the way fans remember it. [But] the level of commitment to the games and [to] honoring the games as much as we possibly can is very real.\u201d<\/p>\n Understandably, the \u201cFallout\u201d crew was not able to build an entire city from the ground up. So instead of incorporating every building on the New Vegas map, they aimed to include some favorites along with ones that best served the story.<\/p>\n The \u201cFallout\u201d cast and crew on the Freeside set in Santa Clarita. <\/p>\n (Lorenzo Sisti\/Prime Video)<\/p>\n Freeside, which is the district that exists in the remnants of Las Vegas\u2019 Fremont Street, was built on a lot in Santa Clarita previously used by shows like \u201cWestworld<\/a>\u201d and \u201cDeadwood<\/a>,\u201d while a defunct shopping mall was transformed into the New Vegas Strip.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause I\u2019m dealing with real buildings that exist in the real world, it\u2019s not laid out exactly the same as it is in the game,\u201d says Howard Cummings, the show\u2019s production designer. \u201cI put some greatest hits of Freeside, essentially, in a three-block radius on one street. They are laid out progressively similar to the game, but not the [exact] relationship in the actual game.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the focal points in Freeside is the Atomic Wrangler, a multi-story casino and bar with lodging that was featured in \u201cFallout: New Vegas.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Atomic Wrangler was so specific in the game,\u201d says Cummings. \u201cIt has specific architecture and has this terrific neon sign that I love with the cowboy \u2026 There\u2019s no way to take [a building that] already existed [on set] and have it look like the Atomic Wrangler \u2026 so I put a facade in front of a facade.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of that wizardry went into the interior of the Atomic Wrangler as well. The first floor bar area, for instance, is actually housed in a different building across the dirt street.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the old saloon in \u2018Westworld,\u2019\u201d says Cummings, who was also the production designer on Nolan\u2019s sci-fi western that aired for four seasons on HBO. \u201cTurning that into a \u201850s nightclub was really fun. What used to be the stage in the old saloon got shifted to the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n Lucy (Ella Purnell) browses the merchandise in Sonny\u2019s Sundries. <\/p>\n (Prime Video)<\/p>\n The \u201cFallout\u201d series marks the first television project for Howard, who is known for his work on the \u201cFallout\u201d and \u201cElder Scrolls\u201d series of video games. Besides the scale of the production, what has surprised him the most has been just how much the show does utilize practical designs and effects.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought more of it would be fake,\u201d Howard says. But \u201cthey really wanted to make everything as practical as possible. \u2026 It\u2019s not just the scale of it, but the level of detail and the small things \u2014 I was pretty blown away. I thought there\u2019d be more \u2018movie magic,\u2019 fakery, but no.\u201d<\/p>\n He recalls visiting the Vault set for the first time during the show\u2019s first season and being amazed that not only had the crew built a full Vault people could walk through, but how even the smallest detail \u2014 like a multi-page report on an official\u2019s desk \u2014 was fully fabricated.<\/p>\n This attention to detail is apparent within New Vegas as well, from the various goods sold at Sonny\u2019s Sundries (at marked-up prices) to the working monitors of all sizes seen in a certain executive penthouse.<\/p>\n For Nolan, walking onto New Vegas for the first time came with a unique sense of familiarity thanks to having played the games.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Germans haven\u2019t come up with a phrase for it yet, but there\u2019s the form of deja vu that you get when you enter a physical version of a space that you\u2019ve come to know virtually,\u201d says Nolan, who explains he felt that sense for the first time when he visited Miami after coming to know the city in a \u201cGrand Theft Auto\u201d video game.<\/p>\n But what he especially delighted in was being able to feature a Deathclaw outside the Strip.<\/p>\n \u201cFallout\u201d executive producers James Altman, left, and Jonathan Nolan and co-executive producer Noreen O\u2019Toole at the video village. <\/p>\n (Lorenzo Sisti \/ Prime Video)<\/p>\n \u201cThe Deathclaw [is] such a hallmark of that of that game,\u201d says Nolan. \u201cEveryone begins \u2018Fallout: New Vegas\u2019 by looking at Vegas and going, \u2018Oh, I\u2019ll walk to Vegas.\u2019 The reason you can\u2019t just do that is the Deathclaw, you find that out very quickly, so bringing that to life and spending time on set with the amazing artists of Legacy [Effects] and [Industrial Light & Magic] \u2026 was just an extraordinary collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n While the first season of \u201cFallout\u201d<\/a> was filmed in New York (and other locations), the team moved the production to California<\/a> for Season 2. The move involved disassembling the Vault sets and transporting them across the country in 77 semitrucks to be rebuilt again \u2014 this time all connected on one sound stage \u2014 in L.A.<\/p>\n Nolan says \u201cFallout\u2019s\u201d move back to California was \u201clargely for creative reasons\u201d and to reconnect with his former \u201cWestworld\u201d crew members, but he has also been outspoken about the importance of getting Hollywood productions back to California. He even invited state lawmakers on set while filming Season 2 to show them the importance of California\u2019s film and TV tax credit program to reverse the exodus of Hollywood productions.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hopeful,\u201d says Nolan. \u201cWe\u2019re going to keep shooting \u2018Fallout\u2019 here. Season 3 [is] heading into production, hopefully, later this year and we\u2019re going to do our part. But hopefully other people will be pushing hard to bring as much production back to California as possible.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story contains spoilers for the fifth episode of \u201cFallout\u201d Season 2. On a sunny afternoon in late…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":515212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,67002,19919,230075,37740,1910,2961,224,5337,230073,207314,33797,230076,18904,5950,6166,4370,6620,230074],"class_list":{"0":"post-515211","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-california-coast","11":"tag-character","12":"tag-creative-team","13":"tag-fallout","14":"tag-game","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-lucy-maclean","19":"tag-new-vegas","20":"tag-nolan","21":"tag-practical-set","22":"tag-production","23":"tag-season","24":"tag-series","25":"tag-show","26":"tag-time","27":"tag-video-game-location"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115892831601499399","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768384153_678_.jpeg\")
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